Highlander Folk School
A residential education center in the Tennessee mountains, founded 1932, that formed organizers for the southern labor movement in its first decades and then for the civil rights movement after — Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Septima Clark, and thousands less famous all spent time there. Shut down by the State of Tennessee in 1961 for racial integration; reopened as Highlander Research and Education Center; still operating in 2026. The longest-running American example of formation-through-practice.
The Story
Myles Horton came back in 1932 from Union Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago, and a stay among Denmark’s folk schools with a question: what would a school look like if it took the people who actually had the problems of working-class southern life and put them in a room together where they could work out the answers themselves? The Danish folk school tradition (Grundtvig’s folkehøjskole, going back to the 1840s) was the closest existing model. Reinhold Niebuhr helped Horton raise initial funding. In 1932, Horton and Don West opened the Highlander Folk School on land donated by Lillian Johnson near Monteagle, Tennessee.
The early Highlander was a labor school. CIO organizers attended residential workshops, formed strategies, learned songs (the school’s musical tradition became one of its lasting contributions — Zilphia Horton collected and taught songs that fed into the civil rights soundtrack of the next decade; “We Shall Overcome” was adapted into its now-familiar form at Highlander). From 1944, Black and white organizers met as equals in a state where that was illegal; in the 1930s the school had bowed to local pressure and not admitted Black students. Integration was enough to make it a target.
By the 1950s the focus had shifted from labor to civil rights. Highlander ran Citizenship Schools — residential workshops that trained Black southerners to teach literacy in their own communities (largely so they could pass voter registration tests). Septima Clark, who developed and ran the Citizenship Schools, was one of the most consequential American educators of the twentieth century and is far less credited for it than she should be. Rosa Parks attended a workshop at Highlander in the summer of 1955, months before her arrest in Montgomery. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there. John Lewis went through. Stokely Carmichael went through.
In 1961 the State of Tennessee revoked Highlander’s charter and confiscated its land, on official grounds that included selling beer without a license and operating for private profit; the actual grounds were racial integration. Horton was prepared. The school had already taken steps to continue under a different corporate form. The work resumed almost immediately under the new name Highlander Research and Education Center, now based in New Market, Tennessee.
In 2026, Highlander is still operating. The work has expanded beyond civil rights into Appalachian economic justice, immigrant rights, climate organizing, prisoner solidarity, queer and trans liberation, indigenous land defense. In 2019 the main office building burned down (arson; a white supremacist symbol left at the scene; a suspect pleaded guilty in 2026). They rebuilt. They are still there.
Why It Matters
Highlander is the institutional answer to a question every emancipatory project eventually faces: how do you form the people who will do the work, in a way that does not depend on the funding cycles, charismatic founders, or political fortunes that destroy most such projects within a generation?
Horton’s answer was specific and durable:
- Residential. People came and stayed for days or weeks. The learning happened over meals and walks as much as in workshops. The relationships formed in residency were the network the work happened through afterward.
- The participants are the curriculum. Highlander did not bring expertise down from above. It brought people with problems together with people who had faced similar problems, and the curriculum emerged from what they collectively worked out. The staff facilitated, did not instruct.
- Modest in scale, ambitious in selection. Highlander never tried to be big. It tried to form the people who would form others. The Citizenship Schools were the multiplier — each Highlander-trained teacher trained dozens more in their home community.
- Politically explicit. Highlander did not pretend to be neutral. It was for labor when the labor movement needed it, for civil rights when civil rights needed it, for whatever liberatory project was at hand. This made it a target but also made it legible — people knew what they were coming to.
- Institutionally prepared for repression. Horton had legal structures, alternate corporate forms, and political allies in place before the State of Tennessee moved. When the charter was revoked, the work did not stop. This is rare.
The most important inheritance: Highlander demonstrates that formation networks can outlive their original political moment. The school formed labor organizers, then civil rights organizers, then a generation of contemporary organizers in domains its founders did not anticipate. The form persisted because the form is the point.
What They Actually Do
Highlander in 2026 runs residential workshops on its property in New Market, Tennessee. The work moves with what organizers need — recent programs have included frontline community climate organizing, immigrant rights work in the rural South, prison divestment campaigns, trans and queer organizing in Appalachia, Black land sovereignty. It hosts cohorts of organizers from different movements who would not otherwise meet. It maintains an archive (a researcher’s gold mine on twentieth-century American organizing history). It continues to develop curriculum that other movement organizations use.
The school owns its land and buildings. It funds itself through individual donors, foundation grants, and earned income from the residential program. It has board governance with deep movement representation.
Further Reading
- Cooperative Extension Service — sibling formation network, different politics, different durability mechanism
- Appropriate Technology Movement — overlapping era and values, much weaker institutional form
- Zapatista Autonomy — a different lineage of explicit politics + durable institution
- Highlander Research and Education Center — https://highlandercenter.org/
- Horton, Myles, The Long Haul: An Autobiography, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl (Doubleday, 1990; Teachers College Press, 1998)
- Glen, John M., Highlander: No Ordinary School (University of Tennessee Press, 1996)
- Schneider, Stephen A., You Can’t Padlock an Idea: Rhetorical Education at the Highlander Folk School, 1932–1961 (University of South Carolina Press, 2014)
- On the Citizenship Schools: Brown, Cynthia Stokes (ed.), Ready from Within: A First Person Narrative — Septima Clark (Africa World Press, 1990)
Bring the people who have the problems into a room together. Trust what they work out. Build the institution that outlives the political moment that called it into being.